If it wasn’t so important for him to believe us, I’d laugh out loud at the look on Liam MacAntyre’s face.
It’s shock. Pure and simple.
The kind of shock that tells me he not only had no idea, but the whole thing is completely and utterly absurd to him.
Again, if Roisin didn’t need him to believe it in order to clear her name…
Yeah. It would be pretty fucking funny. It’s rare to pull one over on a guy like this, and Liam MacAntyre, unlike his brother, appears to be both smart and relatively aware of all the shit going on around him.
But he couldn’t have had any idea that this was coming.
Neither did I, as it were.
“Liam?” Roisin’s voice is uncharacteristically small. It makes me shuffle, and before I realize what I’m doing, I catch myself trying to stand in front of her.
Like I’m going to protect her.
From her own brother.
The fuck are you doing?
Liam blinks, shaking his head like a dog. “Sorry. I could have sworn you just said that Marco De Luca is here as your date. To my wedding.”
Roisin straightens a little, the iron that I’m used to seeing etching her posture. “That’s because I did.”
“But…” Liam trails off. He glances between us.
I see the moment something clicks for him.
“Well then De Luca, I guess the mystery of where you’ve been for the past fucking year is solved.”
“My family was aware of my whereabouts,” I say softly.
Liam’s eyebrows raise. “I think they were not.”
“Would it be any of your business?” I say sharply.
Liam’s nostrils flare, and I can see his eyes, which look so much like Roisin’s, darken with anger.
It’s true. It wouldn’t be his business. His brother, Kieran, had tried to kidnap my sister. Kieran also tried to kill my niece, and I was so hell-bent on proving Elio guilty for the murder of my parents that I never fucking saw it coming.
The thought of the whole situation, and my own blindness in everything that happened back then, makes me shiver with rage at myself. To this day, that span of time is one of the worst things that has ever happened to me.
And it was even worse for Caterina.
I still thank God for Gia and Elio, who were able to quickly figure out where she was and saved her.
Because I was too fucking adamant that Elio had killed my parents to admit that he hadn’t. And, in the process, I’d made more enemies in the form of the Irish.
To this day, we’re still on shaky ground. Liam is a much, much better man that Kieran was, in terms of his general sanity.
However, that doesn’t make him happy to see me, by any means.
I force myself to crack a smile. “Roisin and I met while she had me in custody.”
“So you know, then,” he rasps.
Interesting. His voice carries the same protective note that mine often does when I talk about my siblings.
I tilt my head. From what I remember, Liam didn’t grow up with Kieran and Roisin. He had an uncle or something who took him. Maybe the birth mom, I can’t remember.
But I’m going to figure it out right fucking quick.
“I know that Roisin works for Interpol. Something that I imagine Interpol doesn’t necessarily want to know.”
“Aye,” Liam interrupts. “And the fucker who tattles on her— “
“I quit,” Roisin blurts.
We both look at her.
She sighs, and the breath she takes conveys so much weariness that I resist the urge to step next to her and wrap my arms around her shoulders.
“I quit working for Interpol. It was just too hard. I couldn’t… lie to them anymore,” she manages.
Liam’s lips thin into a hard line. “You didn’t want to tell me the last time I saw you, then?”
“No,” she says sharply.
“It was just—”
“I said no. I wasn’t ready to tell you then, and when I heard about you getting married, I wanted to come. To welcome Stassi into the family,” she says.
I don’t miss the way she cut him off. When did he last come by?
And why?
Liam’s eyes narrow. “How did you know she goes by Stassi?”
“She’s literally a world-famous model, Liam. Congrats on that too, by the way,” I drawl.
Stassi has a PhD in physics too, but she likes to keep that under wraps, if memory serves. It makes her significantly more dangerous than anyone realizes.
Which is another reason I agreed to this whole song and dance.
Anastasia Novikov doesn’t do anything anyone tells her to without very, very good reason.
There is no way she would have agreed with Elio to marry Liam to neutralize the Irish threat without some kind of plan. Liam had kidnapped Gia, my sister-in-law and Elio’s twin, to try and forge some kind of alliance between the organizations. Kieran, shockingly, was a terrible leader who practically drove the Irish organization into bankruptcy, a dangerous thing when there are no banks and people come looking for their pound of flesh when they don’t get their cash. Gia was pregnant with my brother Sal’s baby when Liam kidnapped her, in order to get some kind of financial backing from Elio.
But Stassi stepped in and volunteered to marry him.
For some unknown reason.
And I want to know what it is.
Because if she has any intention of using her newfound power to hurt my family…
Liam grunts, pulling my attention. “So you’re just here for the wedding.”
“Yes,” Roisin says.
“That’s several weeks away.”
She shrugs. “Figured my new sister could use someone around to do all the girly things with her.”
Liam barks a laugh, earning a strange glance from both Roisin and I.
“Something funny about that, brother?” she says.
He shakes his head and opens the door. “You’ll see.”
Roisin goes in, her shoulders relaxing slightly as she passes the threshold to the door. I hesitate just a second, then follow her.
But not before a large hand presses on my shoulder.
I stop, eye-level with Liam.
He studies me. This close, I can see the bags under his eyes, and the darkness against the edges of his lips.
Liam isn’t fucking happy about this.
In fact, I’d say the opposite is true.
“I don’t know what your fucking game is, De Luca,” he says under his breath, “but if you fucking touch one hair on my sister’s head, all bets are off.”
“What bets?” I say, the picture of innocence.
His lips press into a line, and he lets out a growl. “I’ll fucking show you how deep the crazy runs in this family, you bastard. That’s the fucking bet. You think Kieran and I are different? We’re fucking not. The only difference is that I can keep my leash on, and he never could.”
Now that is fascinating.
I tilt my head and give him a smile, then clap him on the shoulder. “I look forward to spending time with you, Liam. It’s always nice to know more about Roisin and where she comes from,” I smirk.
Liam’s nostrils flare and I know I’ve hit a sore spot.
I hear female voices from further inside the house, and I brush off Liam’s shoulder, following them in.
Despite the fact that I’m supposed to be here to help Roisin, I find that I’m intrigued all around.
Something is rotten in this house. Something is strange about why Stassi, who can have literally anyone she wants, would choose to shackle herself to Liam.
The game has changed. I’m no longer here to help Roisin, which I never really wanted in the first place.
I’m going to do what I do best.
Figure out how to protect my fucking family.
At all fucking costs.
I follow the sound of Roisin and Stassi’s voices as they echo down the hall, noting the details of the house as I go. I’m no stranger to family homes that carry a lot of history. Supposedly there’s a De Luca estate in Italy still, but I’ve never been.
I have, however, been to Elio’s family home in Italy. Fucking stunning. I went when I was in college, and he was there learning the ropes from his dad, a real old-school Italian who had a dark, booming laugh and more than a few raunchy stories always ready to tell.
For a minute, my memory clouds. I remember being so jealous of their relationship. My father was… harder. I never quite knew why, but some of the documents that I found after his death gave me some kind of clue about what might have hardened him.
Including the fact that my mother had an affair.
Including the fact that his father, and his uncles, were all sent to jail in the 80s on bullshit RICO charges, and they left him to run the business alone.
His journal, which I found nearly a week after their deaths, as well as my mother’s journals, all told a story that I had never heard, but explained a lot.
However, a child should not know those things about their parents. After they died, and I couldn’t ask any questions?
It was too fucking much.
“Oh my god. This looks incredible,” I hear Roisin breathe.
Blinking, I take myself back to the present.
And I find myself in a fucking sea of white lace and pearls.
I look around the room, my eyebrows winging up as I do.
There are wedding dresses… everywhere.
We’re in some kind of parlor room, by the looks of it. It’s quite typical of a British Isles parlor room, with wood detailing on all the walls, wood floors covered by antique Persian rugs, and all kinds of pictures, trinkets, and other shit covering every available surface. There’s a piano, which I find somewhat unusual, and a large portrait of a beautiful woman hanging over the fireplace.
And wedding dresses.
I’m momentarily stunned.
Roisin makes a noise again, pulling my attention to the center of the room, where there’s a large tri-fold mirror set up to catch the light from the large windows. A changing screen, very old-fashioned looking, is connected to it, and there are even more wedding dresses frothing the top of the screen.
Behind it, I see the shape of a woman, and I automatically avert my eyes.
I’m not trying to see Stassi naked.
“Well, I like couldn’t decide on any dress and with the tight timeline there just aren’t that many places to do the tailoring,” Stassi says from behind the screen, “so I just like… bought them all.”
I blink.
Liam, finally coming up behind me from the hall, makes a noise. “Anastasia. We have… visitors.”
I glance into the room, watching Roisin as she walks from dress to dress, her fingers lingering on the fabric. The reverential way that she’s touching each one makes something in my chest hurt.
Does she… want to get married?
Fuck.
Movement catches my eye, and Anastasia pokes her head out from behind the screen. She beams at Liam. “I know! Your sister, Roisin! Why didn’t you tell me she was coming?”
She ducks back behind the screen. “Wait! Liam, you can’t like, come in!”
Liam, to my surprise, seems to look a little embarrassed. “It’s not like any of those things matter—”
“You want to jinx our marriage! Oh my god, Liam, are you for real?”
Stassi’s California-style accent is actually entertaining. Not for the first time, I wonder what her dissertation defense was like, and whether it went something along the lines of “Like, this is totally my physics dissertation.”
Roisin turns to us, her eyes twinkling with genuine laughter. For a second, the look on her face freezes me in my tracks.
God, she’s fucking pretty when she’s happy.
Then, she flaps her hands, shooing us from the room. “Go. Get my bags and do man things. We’re good here,” she says.
Then, with a very final click, the doors to the parlor snap closed.
Leaving Liam and I befuddled and a little overwhelmed, scratching our heads in the hallway.
